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What board games have you played recently?
I went through a phase where we seemed to have board games nights with friends a couple of times a month but with the whole pandemic thing that has dried up.
Tonight, I finally got around to trying Lanterns with my wife and we really enjoyed it. It's sort of similar to sushi go with more steps. You play lake tiles which contain lanterns and collect lantern cards based on how you place the lake tiles, then you dedicate those lanterns in different sets to gain honour (points) and at the end, who has the most honour wins.
I finally got to try Wingspan a few weeks ago. It was great! Really enjoyed it. I don't like highly complex games; Elysium is right about the level where complexity starts to become tedious for me. Wingspan just hit the spot.
The PC edition from Wingspan is actually pretty good and like 40% off during the Steam sale .
I played Wingspan a few weeks ago, for the first time. I'd read a few reviews of it, including one here, and was really looking forward to it.
It was nothing special. Just another engine-building game, but with pretty artwork. It was enjoyable, but I was hoping for more.
As a game it's nothing exceptionally good. I think its engine building was of good quality but the artwork and the mood it sets were extremely well done which is what set it apart IMO. It's the first time I actually felt taken into the mood of the game rather than just vaguely seeing cards follow a theme.
Yeah, the theme is what sets Wingspan apart from similar games.
There's an app for your phone to scan any card and hear the bird's songs. I thought it was pretty cool while I was playing the game.
I suppose that's an interesting feature for people who are interested in birds. Unfortunately, I'm not one of them. Also, one of the reasons I play boardgames is to not use computers, phones, software, apps, etc.
I just looked it up on Board Game Geek, that sounds really good and I've enjoyed other Stonemeier games! I might put that on my list!
Tabletop Simulator has been a life saver for board gaming with friends during the pandemic. Most recently we played Root for the first time. It seems like a great game, but does take a little time to learn. I’ve also been playing a lot of 7 wonders duel with my fiancé.
If you can spare the money, there's a very good implementation of Root on Steam, with a very helpful tutorial.
Oh. My. God. I hate Tabletop Simulator (or its website, www.tabletopia.com).
We've had a lot of lockdowns where I live, so I've played a lot of boardgames online. As I mention in another comment here, I run a weekly boardgames group, so we had to investigate online alternatives to keep going.
I get that Tabletop Simulator actually simulates tabletop gaming. You pick up a virtual 3D piece and place it on a virtual 3D board. You can even place one piece on top of another and watch it fall off! The three-dimensionality of pieces has been excellently replicated programmatically. One of the people I game with says he loves it because he feels like he's playing a boardgame.
But I hate it, and so do a few of the people I tried it out with. It's too fiddly. It's over-engineered. It doesn't need to simulate the three-dimensionality of playing pieces. It makes it too difficult to work with. My favourite game happens to be on www.tabletopia.com, and I tried playing it there one day, and the extra mental effort involved in moving and placing pieces broke me. I was a bit tired that day, and by the time I'd played that game for a couple of hours, my brain started shutting down from the exertion.
I've done almost all my online boardgaming on www.boardgamearena.com. It's much easier to use.
It can be janky sometimes, for sure, but I feel like a good mod (with some snap points and scripting) and a few settings tweaks (low physics, rotation angles) can do a lot to improve it. It's definitely not as good as a totally scripting implementation like on BGA and I do find that my games do generally take a little longer than if I were playing them in-real-life, but not egregiously so.
Root's one of those games I always look at in my LGS but I've never pulled the trigger!
Does Magic count? I’ve been getting back into paper magic, playing EDH a bit with just my wife, via webcam, and might try some in-person at my LGS depending on what the scene is there re: vaccinations and masks.
I’ll have a look at Lanterns, we’re always looking for fun two player games.
I run a weekly boardgames group, so I play a lot of boardgames.
Last week, I played Cyclades. You win by building cities on islands - but there aren't enough islands to go around, so winning requires you to conquer someone else's island at some point. It's just the right mix of city-building and warfare. Plus there's an auction to start each turn which adds an extra layer of strategising and competition.
Recently, I've also enjoyed playing:
Photosynthesis
Tang Garden
Nanty Narking
Libertalia
I prefer boardgames where the gameplay forces interaction between players. I don't like games where each player's turn is about them placing workers, getting resources, playing cards, and so on, while all the other players sit around being bored until it's their turn.
Also, I'm loving playing 3-D games like Photosynthesis and Tang Garden! It makes a nice change from all the on-screen boardgames I was forced to play on www.boardgamearena.com during our lockdowns.
EDIT: Corrected the website.
Cyclades sounds really cool! I'll have to have a look for it!
It's cool enough that I bought it a few years back. I only buy the best of the best (in my opinion), and I own less than 20 games, so that should tell you how much I like it.
I've been playing Mechs vs Minions with my friends. It's the League of Legends board game. It's really fun, they split a linear story line into 10 missions. Each missions changes the game mechanics slightly. It's a programming game that reminds me of RoboRally but Mechs vs Minions is a co-op PvE game instead.
They went all out on the art and the package engineering which I appreciate every time I open the box. The missions are hidden in secret envelopes that you can only open when you get to it.
Each missions lasts around 1 to 2 hours which should clock the gameplay at around 20 hours.
One of my favorite mechanic is their rune compass. It's so cool how you roll the rune dice and that's how you pick the AI's direction. Also the way the damage to mechs is applied is really clever. It reprograms your command line. You can never die but each mission has a failure condition. Also missions can degenerate quite fast if you're not careful and don't work as a team.
Edit: How could I forget, my friends have also been designing their own board games and they are actually fun. We're testing them and perhaps some day they can be produced commercially.
Played The Grizzled with some friends last night. The gameplay was very easy to pick up and it was quite effective in uh, evoking the misery of the subject matter (WWI). E.g., one of the cards representing a threat was “the whistle”… It was quite difficult and punishing (fittingly so) so even for a co-op game it doesn’t seem like you’d win too often.
Definitely enjoyed it, though it doesn’t seem like the game play would vary much each session.
My weekly group has met only 3-4 times this year and it's killing me. To cope, I've been playing a lot of The Crew: Mission Deep Sea on BoardGameArena. (I'm in 26 asynchronous games of it at the moment)
It's a great cooperative trick-taking game (like Hearts, Euchre or Bridge) that's a lot of fun. Everyone gets missions like "don't win any trump" or "never lead these suits" or "win a trick using a 2" and it's a neat little puzzle to figure out how to get everything done with limited communication.
Played Dominion with some co-workers before the Thanksgiving break on the official website (basic set is free). I forgot how much fun and generally well-balanced that game is. It went over great, one of the players who was new even won on the third or fourth game.
Also, I just remembered this ad from Ken Jennings. Has anyone played Half Truth?
https://mobile.twitter.com/KenJennings/status/1465026847268241410
Half Truth is pretty good! I don't really love trivia games, but my parents kept talking about wanting to play Trivial Pursuit, which I find insufferable, so I picked this up as an alternative. It won't blow your mind or anything, but each card has six answers, three of which are correct. You score better for getting more correct, but score nothing if you guess any wrong answers.
It's nice to be able to have an alright shot at guessing when you don't know the answer and answer and a little bit of a push-your-luck element so you can score better on things you think you know.
In my mind the biggest problems with trivia board games are a lack of gameplay choices, and just getting screwed over when you have no idea with a question, and I think the game does a reasonable job improving on both those problems.
We got Bosk last summer to play during family game nights -- as something that would appeal to everyone and wasn't too complicated or basic for everyone involved. Let me just say, it is absolutely beautiful. The gameplay is fine, not super compelling, but fun and different; but the game really shines in how you get to populate the board with these breathtaking art assets which are the gamepieces.